A LEADING academic has challenged the historical presumption that children are “being schooled to fail” in Wales.

A LEADING academic has challenged the historical presumption that children are “being schooled to fail” in Wales.

Professor Chris Taylor argues instead that Welsh children out-perform those from other parts of the UK in some areas of their educational development.

The Cardiff University expert believes social differences outside the Welsh education system could explain many of the apparent disparities in educational achievement.

Prof Taylor, a research director at the Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research, Data and Methods (WISERD), used an Assembly briefing on Tuesday to present findings of latest research using the Millennium Cohort Study.

He told AMs that the dominant “crisis account” – that children in Wales, when compared with children in other countries of the UK, are being “schooled to fail” – is inaccurate, certainly in the first few years of their education.

He said: “Just as the original ‘schooled to fail’ argument was criticised for not making fair and equivalent comparisons between the achievements of pupils in Wales and England, so too can similar criticisms be made of the current crisis account.”

During the 1990s a leading education researcher suggested that, compared to England, children in Wales were being “schooled to fail”.

And since devolution, comparisons between the educational achievements of children in Wales and England have continued apace.

The apparent gap in GCSE achievement between Wales and England, recent Pisa comparisons and political differences between the governments of Wales and Westminster have fuelled what Prof Taylor describes as a “crisis account” of the education system in Wales.

In challenging the portrayal, Prof Taylor examined the educational development of children in the first seven years of their lives.

He has drawn evidence of the differences of growing up in different countries in the UK and being schooled in different education systems after considering a range of background factors such as the conditions children are born in to.

He argues that by looking at social inequalities as a child grows up, it is possible to determine whether some systems appear to exacerbate or reduce educational inequalities in the first few years of life.

Prof Taylor added: “Although there is evidence to suggest that there is a need to raise overall levels of literacy and reduce inequalities in vocabulary development between the poorest and wealthiest young children in Wales, children in Wales actually out-perform children from other parts of the UK in other areas of their educational development.

“This could suggest that Welsh pupils aren’t ‘schooled to fail’ as many are led to believe. However, what we have been able to show is that is it important to consider that any differences that may seem to occur between Wales and other parts of the UK may not be due to differences in national education policies, and may be more to do with differences in society outside the education system and policies and practices at a more local level.”

He added: “There is no clear picture, and more awareness of the limitations of such comparisons is needed in policy-making.”

The Millennium Cohort Study is a UK-wide birth cohort study, funded by all the governments of the UK, following more than 19,000 children who were born between 2000 and 2001.

It can be used to compare the educational development of children from across different parts of the UK.

Now aged between 11 and 12 years, the children were carefully selected from different countries of the UK and from disadvantaged and advantaged communities, so the final sample is representative of all children in these areas.